fled.” None remained to be witnesses of his dying agonies, but the chorus of ever amiable and ever-faithful women which also bewailed and lamented him, (Luke xxiii. 27,) but were unable to subdue his inflexible philanthropy. Overcome at length, by the intensity of his pains, he curses Jupiter in language hardly different in terms, and but little inferior in sublimity to the " Eloi, Eloi, lama sabacthani!" of the Gospel. And immediately the whole frame of nature became convulsed: the earth shook, the rocks rent, the graves were opened; and in a storm that seemed to threaten the dissolution of the universe, the curtain fell on the sublimest scene ever presented to the contemplation of the human eye-a DYING GOD! The Christian muse has inspired our modern poets with no strains on this theme, but such as bear the character of plagiarism, parody, or paraphrase on the Greek tragedy. A worshipper of Prometheus would look in vain through all our collections of sacred poetry for a single idea which his own forms of piety had not suggested, or a single phrase whose reference would not seem to him, to have as direct an application to the god-man of Eschylus, as to the Jesus of the Evangelists:

Lo, streaming from the fatal tree,
His all-atoning blood!

Is this the Infinite? "Tis he-
Prometheus, and a God!

Well might the sun in darkness hide,

And veil his glories in,

When God, the great Prometheus, died,
For man, the creature's sin."

The preternatural darkness which attended the crucifixion of Prometheus, was natural enough as exhibited on the stage, and is beautifully described in the language of the tragedy. Nor is there any difficulty in conceiving, that when the mighty effect of so deep a tragedy on the feelings and sentiments of the audience, became an inexhaustible source of wealth to the performers, there would be found those who would be shrewd enough to discover the policy of enhancing and perpetuating so profitable an impression on the vulgar mind, by maintaining that there was much more than a mere show in the business; that it was an exhibition of circumstances that had really happened; that Prometheus was a real personage, and had actually done, and suffered, and spoken as in so lively a manner had been set before them; that the tragedy

an

was a gospel put into metre; and that nothing but " evil heart of unbelief" could induce any man to doubt "the certainty of those things wherein he had been instructed.” It is probably no more than a figure of speech, though certainly very injudiciously chosen, in which Origen calls the crucifixion of Christ the most awful tragedy that was ever. acted.*

But the pretence of the reality of the event would break down, in the judgment of the better-informed, from the total want of evidence to support that part of the detail, which, had it been real, could not have wanted the elearest and most constraining demonstration. The darkness which closed the scene on the suffering Prometheus, was easily exhibited on the stage, by putting out the lamps; but when the tragedy was to become history, and the fiction to be turned into fact, the lamp of day could not be so easily disposed of. Nor can it be denied that the miraculous darkness which the Evangelists so solemnly declare to have attended the crucifixion of Christ, labours under precisely the same fatality of an absolute and total want of evidence.

Gibbon, in his usual strain of sarcasm and irony, keenly asks, "How shall we excuse the supine inattention of the pagan and philosophic world to those evidences which were presented by the hand of Omnipotence, not to their reason, but to their senses? This miraculous event, which ought to have excited the wonder, the curiosity, and the devotion of mankind, passed without notice in an age of science and history. It happened during the lifetime of Seneca and the elder Pliny, who must have experienced the immediate effects, or received the earliest intelligence of the prodigy. Each of these philosophers, in a laborious work, has recorded all the great phænomena of natureearthquakes, meteors, comets, and eclipses, which his indefatigable curiosity could collect; both the one and the other have omitted to mention the greatest phænomenon to which the mortal eye has been witness since the creation of the globe."- Gibbon, vol. 2, ch. 15, p. 379.

This objection of Gibbon is answered by Bishop Wat

* His answer to Celsus, chapter 27. What other than this is the sense of those words of the apostolic chief of sinners, "O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you, that ye should not obey the truth, before whose eyes Jesus Christ hath been evidently set forth crucified among you?"-Gal. iii. 1. Surely, it was not in the country of the Galatians that Christ was crucified; nor could he have been set forth before their eyes, and evidently, otherwise than by a picture, or in a theatrical representation !

son, in a double-entendre paragraph, which opens with the curious word to the wise, that " though he was aware he was liable to be misunderstood in what he was going to say, yet Mr. Gibbon would not misunderstand him." Then follows the most extraordinary declaration of his own, (a bishop's) faith," that however mysterious the darkness at the crucifixion might have been, he had no doubt the power of God was as much concerned in its production, as it was in the opening of the graves, and the resurrection of the dead bodies of the saints that slept, which accompanied that darkness."-Third Letter to Gibbon, last paragraph. Another way of saying, that every sensible man must perceive that one part of the story was just as probable as the other, or that it was a romance altogether. The good Bishop ventured to trust his security to the well-proved truth of the adage, "None are so blind as those who will not see."

The immoral and mischievous tendency of the doctrine of atonement for sin, so acceptable to guilty minds, and so eagerly embraced by the greatest monsters of iniquity, had been preached by self-interested priests, and reprobated by all who wished well to mankind, long before that doctrine was deduced from the Christian Scriptures, long before those Scriptures are pretended to have been written.

Before the period assigned to the birth of Christ, the poet Ovid had assailed the demoralizing delusion with the most powerful shafts of philosophic scorn:

"Cum sis ipse nocens, moritur cur victima pro te?
Stultitia est morte alterius sperare salutem."

"When thou thyself art guilty, why should a victim die for thee? What folly it is to expect salvation from the death of another,"

No particle of difficulty remains, then, in accounting for the fact, that in that portion of the Acts of the Apostles in which the miraculous style is discontinued, and we so clearly trace the probable and most likely real adventures or journal of a missionary sent out from the college of the Egyptian Therapeuts joined on as an appendix to some fragment of their sacred legends which detailed the mystical adventures of the supposed first founders of their order, whose example the missionary was to have continually before him,*-we should read, that when the

*This appendix commences in the 13th chapter, where we fmd Saul in the mission at Antioch, and preaching again, one of the sermons which had been before ascribed to Peter.

apostolic Therapeut attempted to preach his doctrine of "Jesus Christ and him crucified," at Athens, he found that the Athenians were already in possession of all he had to communicate, and that what he was endeavouring to set off as a doctrine newly revealed, was with them a very old story. He brought to their ears "no new thing."* The Epicurean and Stoical philosophers were more at home than himself upon that subject, and called him “a babbler,' the very term that most expressively designates the character of a doting ignoramus, who, in the arrogance of his own conceit, will be for ever foisting up old stories of a hundred thousand years standing, and swearing that they had occurred in his own experience, and had happened to nobody else but some particular acquaintances of his.

The majority, however, carried the vote that he should have a fair hearing, and Paul was allowed to preach in the Areopagus. The previous rebuke he had received had completely subdued his impertinence; he no more presumed to lay claim to originality in the crucifying story. He preached PURE DEISM, quoted their own poets, and ventured not once so much as to name his Jesus, or to make an allusion that could be construed as referring to him rather than to any other of the god-men or man-gods who had risen from the dead as well as he. (Acts xvii).

PROMETHEUS, exactly answering to the Christian personification PROVIDENCE, is, like that personification, used sometimes as an epithet synonymous with the Supreme Deity himself. The Pagan phrase, “Thank Prometheus,' like the Christian one, Thank Providence," its literal interpretation, meant exactly the same as "Thank God!" Thus in The ORPHIC Hymn to Chronus or Saturn, we have this sublime address to the Supreme Deity under his name Prometheus, "Illustrious, cherishing Father, both of the immortal gods and of men, various of counsel, spot

*Acts xvii. 18.

† See the original in Eschenbachius's edit. p. 110. Compare also my learned and amiable friend's edition in original Greek inscription types, cast at his own expense.

The three similar epithets, "Various of Counsel," " Various in design,' "Tortuous in counsel," would justify the doctrine, that the whole Trinity was comprehended in this "Prometheus the power of God, and Prometheus the wisdom of God." (1 Cor. i. 24.) "His name shall be called, Wonderful Counsellor, the mighty God." (Isa. ix. 6.) Lactantius admits, that though what the poets delivered concerning the creation of man was corrupted, it was not different in effect from the truth as held by Christians; for in that they have asserted that man was created out of clay by PROMETHEUS, they were not wrong as to the fact, but only as to the name of the Creator.-Lactant. Instit. lib. ii. c. 10.--Kortholto Pagano Obtrectatore, Citante p 34.!

less, powerful, mighty Titan, who consumest all things, and again thyself repairest them, who holdest the ineffable bands throughout the boundless world; thou universal parent of successive being, various in design, fructifier of the earth and of the starry heaven, DREAD PROMETHEUS, who dwellest in all parts of the world, author of generation, tortuous in counsel, most excellent, hear our suppliant voice, and send of our life a happy blameless end." Amen!

CHAPTER XXIX.

THE SIGN OF THE CROSS.

THE NILE was worshipped as a god by the inhabitants of the countries fertilized by its inundations, before all records of human opinions or actions. Plato, who flourished 348 years before the Christian era, records, that the Egyptian priests had pointed out to him on their pyramids the symbolical hieroglyphics of a religion which had existed in uninterrupted orthodoxy among them for upwards of ten thousand years. Nor has the progress of Christianity or civilization, even at this day, entirely abolished the religious honours paid to this king of streams. The priests called the Cophtes still think that they "sanctify its waters to the mystical washing away of sin," by throwing into it some beads or some bits of a cross; as in our own baptismal service in the church of England at this day, the priest spreads his hand over the font, and uses the words, "Sanctify this water to the mystical washing away of sin;" and then sprinkling the water so sanctified in the child's face, and making the sign of the cross upon its forehead, he adds, "We do sign him with the sign of the cross," &c.

THE SIGN OF THE CROSS ENTIRELY PAGAN.

The holy father Minucius Felix, in his Octavius, written as early as the year 211, indignantly resents the supposition that the sign of the cross should be considered as exclusively a Christian symbol; and represents his advocate of the Christian argument, as retorting on an infidel opponent, "As for the adoration of crosses, which you object against us, I must tell you, that we neither adore crosses